Coronavirus surprised us all. Although there were 2 months between the outbreak in China and first cases in Poland, we had little time to prepare. In January we didn’t take it seriously, in February we observed the situation and in March it hit us. And it hit us strong. 11th of March was the day when the schools were closed and it was the start of our home office. Some (mainly parents) were forced to do it right away, others didn’t have to rush but all in all, within a couple of days, we switched to 100% home office. A new era began.
Like many other companies similar to us, we wondered how the situation affected our employees and customers. Our focus was on safety and well-being of our team and effectiveness of projects. We addressed both of these topics to get the idea if we are coping well in the new reality.
At first, in May, we issued an anonymous questionnaire among our crew. 126 employees (61% of all at that time) stated their opinion giving us very good idea of the general mood during home office.
87% of all people considered their situation to be good or very good. The remaining 13% addressed such topics as economic uncertainty or lack of f2f interaction hampering their well-being. Similar results were observed when it comes to Codelab’s communication and decisions regarding COVID-19.
85% of respondents felt that they had access to the necessary resources and noteworthy 96% thought the team was doing well with remote working.
Three biggest barriers that were stated were:
- lack of direct contact with colleagues – 42%
- non-ergonomic home working environment (armchair, monitor, etc.) – 35%
- the need to combine work with care of children and relatives – 20%
We individually addressed those immediately after the poll.
One of the very hot issues during Corona lock down was effectiveness of the teams. Our questionnaire showed that 37% of people describe their remote work as more effective than in the office, whereas 57% as equally effective. Impressive results that point out that our employees are happy with their home offices.
The above results were later confirmed by our customers. Each year we gather feedback from them, this time we added a special coronavirus question: “How do you assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our cooperation in recent months?”. We evaluated this in the context of four factors: effectiveness of performed tasks, quality in communication in the project, quality of direct 1:1 communication and technical conditions of cooperation (availability of equipment, tools, etc.). A vast majority (around 90% for each question) of answers from our customers showed that they see no change whatsoever between work in the office and remote work. And, although it’s not directly related to the topic of this article, but is definitely worth bragging about, our NPS score was 66.67. Not bad, huh?
To finish this summary, I would like to point out that questionnaires, measures, KPIs etc. are one side of the coin but the other is maintaining a proper well-being of the crew. The trick is to be sure that the needs of all interested parties (employees, customers and even the government in this case) are balanced and don’t get behind. Our story shows that it is possible to achieve that. And now, to finish with the punchline, I would like to quote one of the answers from our questionnaire:
“Under changed conditions, it makes no sense to maintain the old culture. It’s more appropriate to develop a new one.“
Kudos to Jan Zaborowski for data collection and analysis
